Investigative Journalism Education Consortium (https://ijec.org/tag/data/)
The Northeastern University School of Journalism and Comm Studies Dept is hiring an investigative/ data-oriented faculty member. The position is open rank, which means anywhere on the tenure-track to tenured spectrum.
Many practitioners date the beginning of computer-assisted reporting and data journalism to 1952 when the CBS network in the United States tried to use experts with a mainframe computer to predict the outcome of the presidential election.
That’s a bit of a stretch, or perhaps it was a false beginning because they never used the data for the story. It really wasn’t until 1967 that data analysis started to catch on.
This is a research paper that was accepted but not presented at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2017 Academic Track, which IJEC organized and covered.
Anastasia Valeeva from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford researched the culture of data reporting in Russian investigative outlets through interviews, case studies and qualitative content analysis.
“In this study, I wanted to show how open data is used for investigative storytelling in Russia, and what are the barriers that prevent journalists from embracing it. To answer these questions, the study draws on a combination of semi-structured interviews with investigative journalists and open data experts, case studies, and qualitative content analysis. In the final section, I discuss the existing barriers and provide guidelines on how to make investigative data journalism stronger in Russia.”
This is a research paper that was presented at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2017 Academic Track, which IJEC organized and covered.
Laurence Dierickx from the Université Libre de Bruxelles compares quality assessment models for data and their journalistic implications. Utilizing these models, she analyzes the data quality of a case study, namely an automated news generator that is based on air quality data.
“This paper proposes a conceptual framework to assess data quality with a combination of deterministic and empirical quality indicators. If data quality is a multidimensional concept, the object is here to establish how to fit the needs of journalistic projects. Formal quality indicators are essentials when data are collected and/or automated. We can call it the technical challenge. Empirical indicators are also essentials regarding professional practices. We can call it the journalistic challenge. This part of the paper also demonstrates how and why data quality literacy is able to meet and to support journalistic requirements.”
This is a research paper that was presented at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2017 Academic Track, which IJEC organized and covered.
University professor and database journalism specialist Milagros Salazar researches the role of data in journalism, its potentials and limits.
“Journalism is full of data, but not everything is data journalism. There is a difference between using data and establishing a methodology in journalistic research that has, as a fundamental aspect, the organization, analysis and verification of data to find a real story.
But data alone are not enough. It is important to verify them and put a human face on them in order to find a real story to tell your audience. If data are not tested against the situation “on the ground”, there is a danger that they will show us lies, instead of helping us tell the truth in order to help people take better decisions for their lives.”
This slideshow was presented along with the research paper “Covering Oil: Big Data, New tools and Journalism”.
This academic essay explores which first steps could be taken by journalists and media to boost data journalism amid an atmosphere of constant struggle between the government and the press. The essay focuses on the analysis of the Ecuadorian case, with brief references to data journalism developments in other countries. In Ecuador there is an Access to Public Information law, but compliance with the law is not fully achieved.
The article presents the partial results of over 50 hours of non-participant observation of the routines of the first team of data -driven journalism ( JGD ) formed in the Brazilian press : journalists and programmers responsible for publishing Estadão data, from the newspaper O Estado de São Paul . The observations are complemented by interviews with team members and by document analysis , following the suggestion of Singer (2011 ), for an ethnographic approach including a triangulation of information sources. The focus of the material collected is based on identity, cultural and biographical factors that led these journalists to learn the techniques of JGD and act professionally in this specialty.